Why Britain Is Saying No to Trump’s Iran War
· The Atlantic
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on President Trump’s dangerous disregarding of Congress’s powers of war-making and peacemaking. David argues that though Republicans have enabled the president’s dark impulses, Democrats in congress also seem happy to turn a blind eye to the Trump administration’s actions in Iran. This, David argues, jeopardizes the restraints put on the President in a constitutional government.
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Then, David is joined by Alastair Campbell, a writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics, to discuss how President Trump has poisoned the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. Frum and Campbell analyze how Trump’s impulsive war in Iran has put further strain on the alliance and how Trump’s relationship with Prime Minister Starmer differs from President Bush’s relationship with Tony Blair at the outset of the war in Iraq.
Finally, David ends the show with a discussion of the German novel The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann. David explores how the novel offers a poignant portrayal of moral compromise in Nazi Germany.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Alastair Campbell, co-host of the extraordinarily successful British podcast The Rest Is Politics. Previously, he served as the most intimate aide of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and he worked especially in that capacity on the U.S.-U.K. relationship. And in this time of war in the Middle East, I thought Campbell, who was such a central figure in the U.S.-U.K. partnership in the Iraq War of 2003, could cast light on what is right and what is wrong in the U.S.-U.K. relationship in this war in the Persian Gulf.
My book this week will be a novel, The Director, by the German writer Daniel Kehlmann, published in 2023 and translated in 2025. It’s a fascinating study of moral compromise in the production of art and also relevant to many of the questions Americans are wrestling with today.
Before I turn to any of that, let me begin with some opening thoughts about the raging and intensifying and escalating and prolonging conflict that the United States is waging in the Persian Gulf against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I record this podcast on the morning of Monday; you will probably watch or listen to it somewhat later, and so you may know more about current events than I do. I will not try to keep up with the military situation in the Gulf. I wanna talk instead about an increasing constitutional crisis that this war poses at home.
This war, at the time I record and probably still at the time you watch or listen to it, has not in any way been authorized by Congress. And it needs to be emphasized how unusual this is. I composed a short list of the major conflicts the United States has fought since 1945: Korea, Vietnam, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the Panama invasion in 1989, the Gulf War in 1990, Somalia, the Kosovo War, the war in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libya war, the ISIS war that started in 2014 as sort of an aftershock of the Iraq War. Now, it is impressive how many of these wars had explicit congressional authorization. The Gulf War was authorized by Congress. The Afghanistan War was authorized by Congress. The Iraq War was authorized by Congress.
Now, other wars were not, but they still had a legal basis. The Korean War, for example, was not authorized by Congress, because in 1950, Americans believed very intensely in the integrity of the United Nations. They had yet to be disillusioned by that. And in the United Nations Charter, it said that acts of aggression would be met by the combined action of United Nations Security Council members. When North Korea invaded South Korea in the summer of 1950, the Soviet Union was boycotting the United Nations at the time. And so [they were] able to pass a Security Council resolution calling on member nations to support South Korea against North Korea. And so President [Harry] Truman argued, Not only do I not need authorization by Congress, but Congress has already authorized the war by authorizing us to join the United Nations Charter, which calls on member nations to do what didn’t happen in the League of Nations and enforce the orders of the United Nations by military power. Now, lawyers will argue about all of this, and of course, the United Nations didn’t go the way Americans hoped it would in 1950. But Truman thought, and Americans agreed, he had a strong legal basis for fighting the Korean War in the authorizing act of the United Nations.
In the same way, George H. W. Bush’s actions in Panama to overthrow the dictator [Manuel] Noriega, which were not authorized by Congress, were presented by him as actions in support of the Panama Canal Treaty between Panama and the United States, which he argued the dictator Noriega was violating by his drug dealing and other crimes—so if not an authorizing act by Congress, then an authorizing act by some kind of treaty of the United States.
Most of the other wars that were fought without authorization were quite limited in scope: Grenada, Kosovo, Libya. Kosovo was costly in money but not in American human life. The Libyan intervention was not an expensive war in either terms, of money or human life, and neither was Grenada. So the presidents of the day would argue, These are policing actions. They don’t require supplemental appropriation by Congress. We can do them based on executive authority. But big wars require either a preexisting treaty or an authorization. Both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were authorized by a vote of Congress. And the war against ISIS was a continuation of the Iraq War, and the Obama administration argued that the Iraq authorizing resolution still held. It was not a dead letter. In 2013, President [Barack] Obama considered getting involved in the Syrian civil war, and he asked for an authorizing resolution from Congress, and when Congress voted no, he chose not to act. That had many other consequences, but it preserved the theory that congressional authorization is necessary for the United States to fight a big, costly, and dangerous war.
So Iran really is a departure here. It’s a war. There’s no treaty. It’s obviously a major war. And there’s no pretense, no pretext, no initiative, no beginning of an act of a request for authorization by Congress. It is not authorized in any way.
Now, some have argued on the basis of this that because of that, the war is illegal and should be stopped as quickly as possible. But that’s kind of a fantasy. The war is on. It is halfway through—or midway through, or substantially through—its stated objectives of reducing Iranian military capacity. We don’t know what the casualties are on the Iranian side. They’re very big. America has also taken losses. American allies in the region are under missile fire. This is like parking an airplane in midair; you cannot stop this war right now and say, Oh, well. Let’s pretend that never happened. This war will have to be fought to some kind of resolution, either successful or unsuccessful. But there’s no stopping it midway through. And that makes the absence of congressional authorization even more glaring.
And the unhappy truth that must be told is many in Congress prefer it this way. See, the secret of the Iran war is it’s not actually as unpopular in Congress as it seems to be in the country. And there are many in Congress, especially on the Democratic side but not only, who support the goals of this war, broadly support the way in which it’s being conducted, but don’t trust Donald Trump, don’t wanna tangle with the progressive wing of their party that wants to stop the war altogether, and prefer not to cast a vote one way or another. And so they are becoming increasingly compliant and even complicit with President Trump’s preference to just do everything on his own, without asking Congress. But Congress needs to make itself heard. And this pattern in Iran is a reminder of how much of the usurpation of the Trump administration is enabled by the willing compliance of Congress, and not only Republicans in Congress, with assertions of presidential authority that they don’t disagree with but don’t wanna be on record one way or the other about.
And this is not a constitutional outcome. And this is an outcome that, anyway, can’t last, because sooner or later, the Trump administration will come to Congress with a request for money. Because the war is costing $1 billion a day; some say $2 billion a day. By the administration’s own account, it had cost more than $11 billion as of the end of last week. Those figures will surely rise. They’re probably understated in all kinds of ways. There will have to be some kind of supplemental resolution that will pass House and Senate to pay for the war that Trump started. And Congress’s dereliction of duty, not being present during the conduct of the war, will meet its judgment at some point when the war is over, or well on its way to being over or much more advanced, anyway, than it is now, Congress is asked, Will you pay for it or not? And Congress will presumably vote to pay for it. So since they’re going to do that, if they’re going to be present at the funding stage, they need to be present at the war-fighting stage.
And this is especially important with an administration as untrustworthy as the Trump administration because the administration is up to things that Congress needs to stop. Secretary of Defense—“Secretary of War,” as he styles himself—Pete Hegseth has given press conferences in which he has invoked the possibility of American atrocities. He has said there will be “no quarter” given, meaning no one will be allowed to surrender. If true, that’s a war crime. But Congress needs to be overseeing: Is this war fought in accordance with American values and the laws of war? Are you taking prisoners when prisoners surrender? Are the prisoners treated properly? Are you doing other things to avoid the taint of atrocity that seems to so fascinate and delight Pete Hegseth?
Congress also needs to be overseeing the question of how is this war not only being paid, but how is it giving off revenue? President Trump has taken lavish gifts from many of the countries that the United States is protecting in this war. He took a plane from Qatar that the United States is protecting. He and his family took a major investment in their corporation from state-sponsored business in the United Arab Emirates. At the end of the Gulf War in 1990, ’91, President George H. W. Bush gained for the United States major payments from U.S. allies in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They contributed to the costs of the 1990 war, and those contributions went into the U.S. Treasury, where they offset the cost of the war, according to provisions established by Congress.
We wanna make sure that President Trump, if he repeats this program, repeats it in an equally legal way and that none of the contributions from allies, if there are any, go into his pocket, those of his family, those of his Cabinet; that he doesn’t turn contributions by allies to American costs into bribes by allies to the Trump family. We wanna make sure of that. That’s Congress’s job: no emoluments, no atrocities. They have to be present. And that means they need some kind of oversight structure, and that means they need to be present in some way in the approval and authorization of this war. They can’t just wash their hands of it and say, Well, if it leads to results we like, we’ll accept them, and if it leads to results we don’t like, we’ll condemn them. But in the meantime, we won’t do anything, because we know that the progressive demand—stop the war—is meaningless and irresponsible and impossible and just words that don’t mean anything. We don’t wanna be with them, but we don’t wanna be with the administration, so we’ll abstain and not be responsible at all.
The ideal of constitutional government is not only a restraint on the power of the president and the powers of other branches of government; it’s an affirmative duty imposed on everyone in government and enforced, in the first place, by Congress. This war purports to be a war of liberation for the oppressed people of Iran. I hope that war aim is true and is met. It purports to be a war of self-defense for the American people, and I hope that claim is true and will be justified by the event. But whatever its motives, however its conduct, whatever fine goals we assert for the war, the war needs to be fought as a constitutional war, as previous American wars always were. And the job of making it a constitutional war is not going to be done, is not of interest to the administration. The job of making this a constitutional war will fall on Congress—mostly Democrats, but also Republicans. It’s a duty that Congress has, and they should stop refraining from it and assert themselves as the first branch of government, defined by the first article of the Constitution and entrusted with the war-making powers and the peacemaking powers of the United States.
And now my dialogue with Alastair Campbell.
[Music]
Frum: Alastair Campbell co-hosts the leading British political podcast The Rest is Politics, but that is only the most recent accomplishment in a career glittering with them. Press secretary and chief speechwriter to Tony Blair in the great Labour victory of 1997, he led the strategy that won two more majorities for the United Kingdom Labour Party in the elections of 2001 and 2005. In government, among many other portfolios, he was crucial to building and sustaining the U.S.-U.K. partnership after the 9/11 attacks, a partnership that came under fire in Britain during the long and difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s an author, too, of some 18 books, if I have the tally right, notably of selections from his voluminous diaries. Expelled from the Labour Party in 2017 for his all-out opposition to British exit from the European Union at a time when the then-leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was slyly temporizing with Brexit, Campbell now looms above the party system like the monarchy or the common law. I’ve had the privilege of appearing as a guest on The Rest Is Politics. I’m honored to host a return visit by Alastair Campbell to The David Frum Show. Alastair, thank you so much.
Alastair Campbell: My pleasure, David. That’s very kind. I’ve actually written 21 books, but anyway, 18 is—
Frum: Twenty-one? So my—
Campbell: Twenty-one, yeah, yeah.
Frum: Okay, I tried to count them all, but I failed.
Campbell: I’ve not written a book since I started doing the podcast, and that’s beginning to get at me.
Frum: So I first met you in the context of the Brexit debate, which was a decade ago, and when you were kind enough to agree to come on the show, that was our headline topic. But since then, a war has broken out, and with it, there is a new rift in [the] U.S.-U.K. relationship, which you have done so much to build and sustain. So I’d like to start with that and then work our way back to the point of origin of where we are, which was Trump and Brexit in 2016. But let’s start with what has happened in the U.S.-U.K. relationship since the beginning of the war in Iran. How do you see where we are, what has happened, and where we’re going?
Campbell: Well, there’s a lot in that, and of course, it’s happening right now. The thing about Trump’s presidency is that he moves and breaks things so often that you kind of forget what the last one was; then you’re on to the next one. So we’re literally still in the same week as when he launched, with the Israelis, this massive attack on Iran. And what’s happened is that [British Prime Minister] Keir Starmer, who is a lawyer by training—and an international lawyer, at that—he decided that he could see no U.K. legal base for taking part in the attack on Iran and therefore did not allow the Americans to use some of our bases.
Twenty-four hours later, because in the Iranian response, there was the sense of U.K. targets being approached by the Iranians, not least in Cyprus, which is currently the president of the European Union in this weird rotating system they have of the EU presidency, and so he decided that, for limited defense operations, two bases could be used—none of which has been good enough for Donald Trump, who has launched not quite [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky–style, but a series of low blows, sitting alongside Chancellor [Friedrich] Merz of Germany in the Oval Office, where [Vice President J. D.] Vance and Trump earlier did beat up Zelensky, and essentially saying that Britain was unreliable, Keir Starmer’s no Winston Churchill, and then going on, for this nth time, this MAGA ridiculous attack on London. You go to London regularly. You know that London’s still one of the most amazing cities in the world. And because we happen to have a brown-skinned Muslim mayor, MAGA has decided that London is one of their great enemies. So I’d say it’s tense and difficult.
Frum: Let me do a little recapitulation of what you’ve just said and some things that are even farther in time behind it. Since Donald Trump returned to power in January ’25, the relationship has been stressed, first and above all, by Donald Trump’s economic aggression against Great Britain and the European continent: a series of tariffs, talks of a U.S.-U.K. free trade agreement that, of course, never materialized. Both the president and the vice president made disgustingly disparaging comments about the valor and sacrifice of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had the honor of visiting British troops in both those countries; I’m sure you did on many more occasions. The sacrifices and the contributions were enormous and real and never to be spoken of disrespectfully, but they did that.
But then there has been this problem, which is, one of the most important of the British bases that the United States uses is the base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. That’s British territory that the British government is negotiating to surrender to the island nation of Mauritius, a thousand miles away. Keir Starmer has made that a big project of his government. And tangled in this network of international law, I think Diego Garcia was one of the bases that Starmer said the Americans could not use, and American use of the big airstrips and the big naval bases at Diego Garcia does depend on British permission. It’s always been assumed that permission would be available; it wasn’t, and that did interfere with the ability to use the big American bombers in the early part of the Iran war.
Campbell: Mm-hmm. One big point you missed when you were telling the backstory was Greenland as well. I think Greenland and the continuing threat to Greenland, where the Europeans have, I think, to some extent, successfully thus far pushed back, although I saw the Danish prime minister at the Munich Security Conference—they still think that it’s very much in Trump’s mind and on the table.
So the Chagos Islands issue, and this is really interesting: Jonathan Powell, who you know and is my colleague with Tony Blair—he’s now Keir Starmer’s national security adviser—he was very centrally involved in this negotiation over the Chagos Islands. And I said at the start, Keir Starmer’s background is the law, and I think, at a time when you have an American president like Trump and a Russian president like [Vladimir] Putin and some of the other guys who think that they are answerable to nobody but themselves and their interests at any given time, he’s responding to a legal decision that governments have to deal with. And by the way, as part of that, he British government was very careful to make sure that the Americans were on their side for that, and they said they were. And publicly—this is what’s so difficult about dealing with Donald Trump: One day, he says he’s fine with something, and the next day, he says he’s completely unfine with it, and governments just have to kind of dance around that.
I think we’re in the week of the 80th anniversary of the term special relationship first being used. And it’s gone up and down; our power has gone relatively down relative to the United States. But I think there is something still quite special about it, but we shouldn’t overstate it, nor should we get too hung up on the fact that there have always been differences—the question, then, is how you manage them. Famously, [British Prime Minister] Harold Wilson refused to send in British troops alongside the Americans of Vietnam. That could have “destroyed the special relationship,” but it didn’t. And I think what we’re seeing at the moment is a politics that is so defined around the personality of one human being, namely, Donald Trump, and what he thinks he is entitled to as president of the United States.
And what’s so strange about this, our politics—so you take the right wing in Britain. The right-wing newspapers today are totally on Donald Trump’s side against Keir Starmer. Why? Because they hate the Labour government and they hate the Labour Party. But these are the same people who talk the whole time about patriotism. And these are the same people who wanted us to come out of the European Union because we shouldn’t have foreign powers telling us what we should do. And yet they want to bow down before, surely, one of the most unhinged, dangerous American presidents there has ever been. So it’s a very, very weird and difficult world that Keir Starmer is trying to navigate.
Frum: I wanna double back to your point about Greenland, and you’re right; I made a terrible mistake in omitting that from the list of decisive incidents, because we were at a point, in the month of January, when European powers were considering whether they would have to use military force to defend a fellow European power, Denmark’s territory, against an invasion by the United States. And I believe there were officers sent, principally French, but I think some British, too, as part of a military planning mission to defend Greenland against the risk of an American invasion. So that obviously stresses the relationship.
But didn’t the special relationship begin—wasn’t it founded on British power, that Britain was not only the most militarily capable of the non-American partners in NATO, but the most globally present? If we’re talking about the year 1970, the Germans had a lot of military power, too, but it couldn’t be projected anywhere much beyond the borders of Germany, whereas British military power in the year 1970 could go all over the world, or many places in the world. And in a sense that the special relationship is America’s relationship with whoever is the second-most-militarily-capable power in the Western alliance, and if that ceases to be Britain because of budgetary reasons and becomes Israel, the special relationship is bound to shift.
Campbell: Look, I think there’s a lot in that, and I think there’s two things that I would add together in this equation. The first is that there was a peace dividend. There was a period during which we felt more secure than we do right now. Not just Donald Trump, but previous American presidents, I think, have had this worry that Europe is just assuming that the Americans will always be there for Europe in any difficult situation that we find ourselves in. So they’re not wrong in saying, look, when you—I know he’s got a particular thing about Spain at the moment, as well as the U.K.—Spain doesn’t spend that much on defense and probably does think, well, it can be part of the European defense infrastructure involved in NATO and the Americans will always be there. And what Trump is basically saying is, No, you guys have got to look after your own backyard. In a more polite, diplomatic way, previous American presidents have said the same. Most European countries now are upping the spending on defense. I don’t know that it’s just about military power. I actually have a sense that the Americans—Trump, Vance, Hegseth, all these guys—I think they want Europe weak. And so, on the one hand, even as the Europeans are saying, Yeah, okay, we get the point; we’re gonna spend more on defense, but then once they try to assert themselves in any way, that provokes the kind of reactions that we’ve been seeing.
Look, if the Americans just decided, We’re gonna roll in on Greenland, okay, I don’t know what the Europeans would do. And the reason why I think the Danes feel so offended and hurt by what’s going on is that there’s never been a problem with the United States having far more bases than they’ve got. They’ve had far more bases than they’ve now got; they pulled back. And so I think that, as ever with Trump, it’s trying to work out what’s a real motivation and what’s not a real motivation. So I think the Europeans—I’m glad that they stood by Denmark. That being said, if Trump did say, I don’t give a damn about that; in we go, that is the end of NATO. And that’s quite a big thing for the world. That’s quite a big thing for the world.
Frum: As you’ve reminded us, there are a long list of Trump infractions, aggressions, and abuses against Europe and other allies too: Japan and South Korea have their complaints, Canada. And as you are right to remind us, international law is important. That’s what protects Greenland from being annexed by the United States. You can’t just have great powers annexing bits of territory—or you can, but none of us, I think, want to live in a world in which that becomes the norm.
But without going down the rabbit hole of the Chagos Island treaty—I wrote a big article about it for The Atlantic, which I recommend to readers who wanna go down this rabbit hole. But it does seem that Britain, at least under this government, has got itself committed to a vision of international law that is so tangled and so one-sided that it constrains democracies; it doesn’t constrain non-democracies. It constrains Western powers; it doesn’t constrain non-Western powers. And anytime you get a ruling from any tribunal anywhere, including literally the International Tribunal [for] the Law of the Sea, everyone else will say, Oh, I guess this big base, Diego Garcia, which the United States and Britain have been fortifying since the 1960s, on which American power in the Indian Ocean depends, I guess that has to go to Mauritius, then.
Campbell: Well, only if that is the judgment that is handed down. Look, I think this has been weaponized. Because we live in this weaponized, polarized political world. Chagos Island is a very good example, where the right wing here have decided, regardless of what the legalities are, that Keir Starmer has done the wrong thing, okay, in agreeing to this deal with Mauritius. Donald Trump, who thought he was doing the right thing, has now moved to a position of saying he’s done the wrong thing, and of course, that then adds fuel to the fire of the people on the right here, who are saying he’s done the wrong thing.
And also, the other thing I would say about international law is that international law is always open to political interpretation. It’s like with the United Nations—the United Nations is a collection of all the governments of the world and all the differences that go with that. What I’m finding strange about what’s happening at the moment is that the Americans don’t even seem to be making the legalistic case for some of the actions that they’re taking. It’s all about the politics.
And so I just feel, with the Chagos Islands, that it wasn’t about surrendering power or further decline [of] post-empire Britain. I think it was trying to tie up a loose end of our security architecture, which we inherited from the last government, who had started that process, and just sort of get it off the table, since when it’s become a far bigger issue than I ever thought that it would.
Frum: Keir Starmer has invoked international law as a reason that Britain didn’t join the American action in Iran, and there are a lot of good reasons to be extremely hesitant about following Donald Trump’s lead on anything. [In] a previous program that I did with Tom Nichols, we worried about what Trump’s war in Iran means for civil liberties inside the United States because war is a grant of power to the president, always, inevitably, and has to be and should be, and if you have a president who can’t be trusted with that grant of power, that means that even necessary wars need to be avoided because the president will get power that he will abuse. He’s proven that he will abuse it.
With that caveat, I’m not telling on a policy judgment, but isn’t there something strange about someone like Keir Starmer, who’s based his career, pre-politics, on international humanitarian concerns, looking at a situation like that in Iran and saying, Hands tied, nothing we can do about it?
Campbell: I don’t think he’s saying hands tied, nothing he would do about it, but he’s saying that the case, as presented to him on a particular time, on a particular day, out of a reasonably clear blue sky—we knew something was coming, but he suddenly gets a demand to take part in the action that the Americans are proposing, alongside the Israelis. And he is making an assessment with our attorney general on the U.K. legal case for us taking part in that.
And bearing in mind, I was part of Tony Blair’s team in the buildup to the Iraq War, post-9/11—you mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan—and I can see why he would be cautious. I would see why he would think that, I’m not going to go into this without being absolutely clear that, further down the track, when maybe it doesn’t go quite as well, when maybe it does lead to all sorts of unintended consequences, as Iraq did in 2003, that there will be a reckoning and an accountability that will look, in very, very heavy, critical historical detail, at every step of this process. And so I think what you’ve seen is Keir Starmer, who, yes, has worked very, very hard at trying to form a good personal relationship with Donald Trump—and people have been surprised that he actually managed to do that at all, let alone what seemed to be quite successfully—but now saying, No, that does not mean that he has a blank check to do stuff that in our assessment, from the British perspective, has no legal base and no clear plan.
So I think you’ve got to at least respect the fact that I think he is actually saying what he genuinely thinks about this, even knowing there will be a political cost to that in the relationship with Donald Trump.
Frum: You and I were both in the building during the run-up to Iraq and Afghanistan. You were obviously in a much more important chair than I was. (Laughs.) And you were a central figure in all of that. And I know you’ve given hundreds of interviews and have spoken about it hundreds of times, and we don’t need to repeat things that have been said before. But drawing from this vantage point—and perhaps this has already happened—if a prime minister of Great Britain would ask you to advise him, based on your experience in 2001, ’02, and ’03, what are the things that a British prime minister should be thinking about and asking about and asking for from an American president in the face of this request for action?
Campbell: I think if there’s something that we didn’t ask enough, it was about what happens after. I think that Tony Blair didn’t need any persuading that the Taliban were a very, very bad, dangerous group of people who were sheltering people who’d been responsible for 9/11. I don’t think he needed any persuading that Saddam Hussein was a real threat. But I think where we didn’t push hard enough—we made assumptions about the post-Saddam for planning. Because we were the junior partner, no doubt about that. Most of the military hardware was American; most of the leadership was American. It’s always stunned me the extent to which Tony Blair probably suffered way more political grief than George W. Bush ever did for these decisions, but we were very much the junior partner.
When you went through that litany from the start of the interview, all the things where Donald Trump has shown his unreliability, shown his lack of respect for us and for the people who fought in those wars in particular and who died in those wars, saying that they kept back from the front line—it was hugely insulting—I think it’s not unreasonable for the prime minister, without going out of his way to offend Trump or the United States, just to be very, very cautious. And what you’re seeing now—just before we started the interview, I was just watching some of the interviews with the congresspeople and the senators who are clear to see all this classified stuff and to have the briefings that they’ve been having, and the line that they keep coming out with is: There was no threat, and there is no plan. Well, if that’s a bunch of American politicians saying that, I think for a British prime minister just to be cautious is not a bad thing.
Frum: I don’t agree with them at all, and I don’t believe they mean it when they say there’s no threat. But the lack of plan really is alarming. And one of the things, if I look back on the Iraq time, the glimpse of it that I had was that many of the people who were most eager to overthrow Saddam, especially Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld, were also eager to demonstrate that the United States had these military capabilities. It could do things in the computer age with a much lighter force. It was a point of principle, almost, to refuse to think about what happened next; that was not their department. The kind of things that Secretary of Defense—or, as he styles himself, “Secretary of War”—Hegseth is now saying belligerently and stupidly were said intelligently and politely in 2003, which is: We don’t wanna do nation building. We don’t wanna do democracy building. That’s not our job. We wanna step back and let the Iraqis run the process. But of course, the Iraqis were inheriting a shattered state, riven by vendettas and anger, with all the most talented people driven into exile, the infrastructure broken. The whole idea that they could stand up something in six months or three was crazy. And of course, the allied powers, the coalition partners, if they were not prepared to sign up for an extended period of state building in Iraq, then getting rid of Saddam was not going to work.
And the Trump people seemed to have looked at the Iraq experience and said, You know what went wrong in Iraq? Too much thinking about the future. We’re not gonna do any of that. And not only are we not gonna do any of it; we’re gonna have special press conferences where we say we refuse to do it, that it’s fake and weak to think about the future. We are not going to think about it. Whatever happens, happens. And you think, Well, if you bring down the mullahocracy, you can’t stand up a government for Iran, a great and ancient civilization. It’s not as riven a society as Iraq was. But still, it’s only 60 percent Persian. It’s got ethnic fringes. And it’s got a lot of vendettas, I assume. You can’t just wash your hands of it after you break the regime’s capacity to hold on to power.
Campbell: I think one of the things that will be weighing in Trump’s mind all the time—because I don’t think it’s too offensive to say he’s got really deeply, seriously narcissistic tendencies; he thinks that he’s very, very special, better than everybody else, understands the world better than anybody else—and he will be thinking, Right, well, I was told that when we move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, that that’s gonna cause absolute mayhem and total chaos and it’s a stupid thing to do. He does it; nothing much happens. He takes out [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro in Venezuela, and everybody says, This is gonna cause complete chaos in the region. And he does it, and it’s not really caused that terrible chaos that was predicted, in part because he’s done a deal with Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s No. 2.
And I think he’s gone in with the same sort of mindset with this. Iran bad—put to one side whether it’s related to kind of [getting] the Epstein files out of the news; I don’t know whether that’s the way he thinks or not, but a lot of people suggest it might be. But he takes out the ayatollah, and then they’re just into this sort of day by day. So today, it’s Hegseth talking about, We’re gonna find and fix, and we’ve sunk this with a torpedo, and proudly saying it’s the first sinking of a sub by a submarine torpedo since the Second World War, at a time when most of the world is thinking, Please don’t create a third world war, and he’s kind of bringing that messaging into the mix. And so what I have a sense of with him is, it is the reality TV show, I’m afraid, and he’s got his characters, and he gives them all a personality, and he gives them names. And in his head, I think this is sort of good v. evil, and he sees himself as good.
Now, I think it’s good to get rid of the Iranian regime. But one of the points I thought Keir Starmer made very powerfully when he was explaining why we weren’t getting involved on day one was he said that there’s never been a successful regime change from the air. There has to be a follow-through plan. There has to be something. You can’t just leave the whole place in complete chaos and then move on to the next adventure. And that’s the feeling you get that is likely to happen, and the next adventure likely to be provoked and inspired by the way that others are responding, rather than as part of some strategic plan that the Americans had from the word go.
You look at the way the Iranians have responded to this—they’re whacking missiles at something like a dozen countries, okay? Now, part of their thinking will be, Let’s get the oil price going, shooting up so that maybe the Saudis and the rest of them start to put pressure on Trump and say, Hold on a minute, this is really, really bad for everybody, not just for Iran. And they might also be trying to get into his mindset of thinking, This is not gonna help you in the midterms, either. So I get the feeling this is something that’s been done through instinct, without really thinking through a lot of the consequences.
Frum: The single consequence that I worry about most is, I have no idea whether the Iranians have any capacity to do terrorism inside the United States, but you have to prudently assume they have some. Right now, as you and I speak, there’s a blockade by Democrats in Congress against funding the Department of Homeland Security for its many, many abuses, for the lies it’s told, and for the strong whiff of self-dealing and corruption that hangs over the agency. So Democrats are saying, We’re not gonna fund their next request for money. But that—as Americans rightly worry that the Iranians may strike back on the American homeland, it’s not going to be sustainable to refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security. And Trump is going to reacquire the powers that he so terribly misused in his first year over domestic security at a time when people around him—we haven’t heard this exactly from him yet, but people around him are whispering, Maybe you can use the military to control or even suppress the 2026 elections. There’s a domestic-freedom price that may be at risk from this war or from the fears that are reasonably stirred by this war.
Campbell: Yeah, for sure. I was in Ukraine last week, and I kept hearing this thing about Donald Trump thinks Zelensky should have an election. And I had a meeting with the electoral commission, who just explained to me what that would mean in practice right now, with 5 million Ukrainians living inside the European Union, several more Ukrainians displaced from their own homes, hundreds of thousands who are fighting. They were basically just saying, well, one, it’s unconstitutional ’cause you can’t have elections under the Ukrainian constitution and martial law. But secondly, practically, it’s virtually impossible. And I do have a slight fear that one of the things that Trump and his team are trying to work towards is maybe that you don’t necessarily have elections at the time that they’re expected, because there’s so much mayhem going on in the world. But if you’re the creator of the mayhem, which right now, he is, and Hegseth started his statement the other day by saying, “We didn’t start this war.” Well, we can have a historical discussion about the various stages, but this stage, they did start it.
Frum: Let me ask you another question about the lessons of 2003. One of the questions I’ve often wondered is, both George W. Bush and Tony Blair were amazingly charming people. And their charm worked on each other, as well. And they developed this very special bond. And a critic of what they were doing could say, You guys got so into each other. You had so much trust, so much cooperation, [it] became such an intense personal relationship that questions of whether this was a good idea, especially on the British end, got subordinated to the paramount urgency, the paramount delight of maintaining this personal relationship that the two of you have developed because you are both such attractive human beings. Now, the good news is, that’s a problem you don’t have with Donald Trump. But do you think there’s anything to that, and do you see lessons there about the risk, especially to Britain, of overpersonalizing the special relationship?
Campbell: You had the same before George Bush with Bill Clinton, but it was more obvious because the political—
Frum: Also a very charming person.
Campbell: Exactly. Because the political alignment was clearer. I think if you went back to that period and I were to say, on any given day, to Tony Blair, Write down a list of all the things that your job has to do well, okay, you, as prime minister. Write them all down, and then try to put them into some kind of order, and I would think having as good a relationship as possible with other world leaders, and in particular, the United States president, would be quite high up, okay? And I think that’s been the same for Keir Starmer, and he’s worked hard at that.
I don’t think that the George Bush–Tony Blair relationship had the overall impact that you’re talking about, because I think they both, with very different personalities, different politics, different backstory, different histories, actually did passionately believe that they were doing the right thing. But one of the factors that wasn’t necessarily the same for George Bush but was for Tony Blair—in Tony Blair’s mind, it was definitely a factor: If I am not going to be with the Americans, I have to be conscious of being a prime minister who might be doing medium- and longer-term damage to a relationship that we really need. Now, that wasn’t top of his list in the U.S.-U.K. relationship vis-à-vis Iraq, but it would have been in there. Did that mean, therefore, that he sometimes lent into the American position with more enthusiasm than he would if he’d only been thinking about his own political position? For sure. But I think he thought, on the bigger picture of the importance of that relationship between the countries, not just as personalities, I think he felt that was why there had to be really good grounds for not being with the Americans on this.
And you mentioned Rumsfeld earlier—I can remember one day when Rumsfeld spoke to Geoff Hoon, who was our defense secretary at the time, and said, Listen, we can do this on our own. If this is too difficult for you guys, you don’t need to be there. We can do this on our own. And Geoff Hoon reported that back to Tony Blair, and I can remember Tony Blair saying to the room, Listen, you guys have gotta get wise to something: I’m not doing this for the Americans; I’m doing this ’cause I think it’s the right thing for us to do.
So I think the personalities make the mood music of a relationship better, but I don’t think it changed the fundamentals of our position that much.
Frum: When you were kind enough to agree to join this conversation, we were thinking then very much about the Brexit 10th anniversary. And a lot of the questions about Brexit suddenly seem very much more urgent now.
Through the past 200, 300 years, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and then Northern Ireland was always the center of a much bigger political unit. For a long time, it was the center of a British empire that had sometimes included the United States, then went on to include India and other places. But Britain was just What do they know of England who only England know? Britain was the center of something much bigger. And even as the empire began to fall away, Britain became the central point in two other, more complicated arrangements: one with the European continent, one with the United States.
Britain in 2026 finds itself alone in a way that is a very new experience, actually, in British history: no European Union, special relationship that exists more as a matter of courtesy and memory than as operational fact, and just a few rocks and islands that remain of the empire. Britain is a European country that is not connected to any kinds of other European partnerships. Has Britain adjusted to this reality of its self-isolation, both from a trade and economic point of view and a strategic point of view?
Campbell: My answer is no, we haven’t. I think that those who argued for Brexit and campaigned and won the campaign for Brexit are still living under the massive delusion that somehow this isolation is good for us, that this supposedly great freedom that we have to set our own laws—which, by the way, we always did have. It’s just that, in some areas, we’d made a decision to pull sovereignty about some of the laws; that’s all. And we never lost that sovereignty. So what’s happened is that—I think it’s like anything that you do in life, where people will take a long time before they admit something may have been wrong. I think it’s the worst act of self-harm. I find it very hard to think of any other actual, specific choice that a country has made for its own future that has done so much harm. Our economy’s probably about—you can pick your reports and take your pick, but we’re probably 5 percent weaker than we were. Our trade is substantially weaker than it was. Our standing in the world has fallen, I think, as a result of it.
Now, I think one of the things Keir Starmer is doing pretty well as prime minister, he’s trying to rebuild that in the European context. It’s interesting, on the back of Iran, the first statement that came out of Europe was from something called the “E3”: France, Germany, United Kingdom. So he’s kind of working at that, but we’re just catching up. And I think until we acknowledge that it is an act of self-harm and that we need to repair it in a meaningful, substantial way, we’re not going to recover from it in the way that we could.
Frum: It was not just one act of self-harm, and this is where the Trump role becomes really sinister. So the British vote in the summer of 2016 to exit the European Union—and under British law, that vote, while it’s a tremendously important political fact, it has no legal meaning. So the government of the day is free to say, The British people have spoken. What they say is obviously very important. Now it’s for us to figure out what it means, how to implement it. And there are then a vast array of choices, from the most minimal to the most maximal, about what that referendum would mean. So over the next three years, Britain made a series of choices, every time for the most maximal. And one of the reasons it made the most maximal choices was, throughout that period, Donald Trump and people around him were saying, If Britain agrees to make the most maximal choice against Europe, we’re going to cut them a wonderful deal for a free trade deal with the United States.
Now, even if that had been true, Britain and the United States are both service-led economies, finance-led economies. They’re not natural intimate trading partners in the way that Britain and its European neighbors are. But still, it’s better than nothing. And Trump kept promising that something would be available—if only Britain cut itself off from Europe as hard and fast and deep and permanently as possible, and British governments agreed to do that. In the end, of course, the whole U.S.-U.K. promise was—it was never intended seriously. It didn’t exist. Nothing has come of it this decade later. And there’s some amount of Trump deception that led the way to this maximal version of Brexit that Britain’s now got.
Campbell: Well, aided and abetted by the fact that for some of that period, Boris Johnson was prime minister, somebody from the same kind of cloth, where politics is all about the game; it’s all about the personal power and the personal fame and aggrandizement. And you take people for a ride, and that’s what Johnson did. He’s been booted out because, eventually, the Conservative Party saw through him. But nobody in our politics right now really wants to grasp this nettle in a way that will make the big leap forward, which is actually to say, We’ve made a catastrophic error, and we have to fix it.
Now, that now opens, because we left, all sorts of really difficult, complicated questions about whether the Europeans want us back, about whether it’s a European Union we wanna join if the far right come in in Germany, the far right come in in France, whatever it might be. It’s not as if Europe’s just static, either. But one thing you hear all the time—I heard this in Ukraine last week, where I was traveling with people from the European Commission, some of the European commissioners—is that they feel that Brexit’s been bad for us, but it’s been bad for Europe as well. A lot of the smaller countries really miss the U.K. as what they saw as a kind of sensible, pragmatic voice that could just keep their eye on the French and the Germans and just kind of steer things for the smaller countries sometimes.
So I think it’s been a catastrophe, but it’s coincided with this period of politics where populism is rampant, polarization is weaponized, and it’s a successful form of politics. It’s what makes Trump. It’s what helps Nigel Farage here. It’s what helps [Marie] Le Pen and [Jordan] Bardella in France. It’s a very powerful force in the modern media age. And we’ve also entered this era of post-truth, where a fact is no longer a fact. If you talk to the people who fought for Brexit, Boris Johnson will tell you it’s the greatest thing we’ve ever done. Nigel Farage would say, Well, it’s not going exactly as I wanted it to, but that’s because they haven’t done the Brexit I wanted; they’ve done a different sort of Brexit—without ever having to explain what that means in practice. And meanwhile, the reality of Brexit is a weaker economy, a weaker country, and as you say, a country that feels pretty isolated in very, very dangerous times.
Frum: Do you see some possibility of hope here? My sense of it was, the proximate cause for Brexit in 2016 was the Syrian civil war in 2014 and 2015, which sent multiple hundreds of thousands, maybe even multiple millions of people on the way from the Middle East to Europe—and not only from Syria, but the collapse of immigration authority and restraint that happened because of the Syrian civil war also opened the way to people from North Africa, from farther places in the Middle East, from the Far East. And Europe had this sudden shock of enormous numbers of people arriving all at once, and centrist governments all over the European Union collapsed, in Poland and other places; it’s crucial. Viktor Orbán in Hungary was in a lot of trouble in 2014, 2015, and the mass migration saved him and gave him a story that he could tell, and so through the continent. And it pushed Brexit, and it helped elect Donald Trump in a kind of indirect way.
Well, that’s all over, and it’s a decade later, and there are now new political stimuli, above all the threat of Russian aggression. Are we now possibly at the beginning of a new era, where Europeans rediscover why they need to work together to protect themselves against Russia, China, and, unfortunately, Donald Trump’s America too?
Campbell: Well, I’d like to think so, but I can’t say the signs are really great. I do think Europe has done a reasonable job in relation to Ukraine, post–the evidence sign that the Americans were gonna pull the plug on a lot of the military stuff. But I wouldn’t go much stronger than reasonable. I think that we have relied so much on the kind of bravery and the fortitude of the Ukrainians themselves.
And I also think that—you mentioned Hungary there. They’ve got an election on April the 12th. Now, as it happens, Orbán is well down in the polls, but I wouldn’t put anything past him. And he’s now hitting some very, very hard-right messaging in terms of how he thinks he can get through the last lap of this. And don’t forget, in relation to immigration, this Iran conflict is gonna produce all sorts of new pressures on migration flows. And of course, one of the things that the Russians are quite good at doing is stress-testing our borders the whole time and shipping people over and so forth. So, no, I don’t think the immigration issue is over, far from it; I think it’s still a very, very potent part of our politics. And of course, it’s then, on the other side of it, one of the big debates we’re having here are the demographics of the European Union. A society like ours needs immigrants to come and do a lot of the jobs that a lot of British people simply don’t want to do. But politically, that’s a very, very difficult debate to have right now. So, no, I don’t think we’ve moved to that.
I do think that the combination of [the] rise of China; nobody now thinking that Putin, as we thought of it when he first came along, that this is a guy who wants to lean more towards the West—nobody thinks that anymore. But I think the really big game changer on this in the last couple of years has been the American position. It’s a very, very hard thing for a Brit to say this and to feel this, but it’s really hard to escape the notion that, basically, when it comes to Ukraine, the Americans are on Putin’s side, the way they talk about it. And of course, it’s very hard for the leaders to go out and say this because we’re still relying on Americans for intelligence and so much else. But if you look at the graphs of where the money is coming to help Ukraine in its military fight, the Americans have virtually fallen off the graph. And yet still, we’re expected to believe that only Trump and [Jared] Kushner and [Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve] Witkoff have got the power or the authority to negotiate any kind of outcome. Why? Because Putin doesn’t want the Europeans anywhere near the table.
Frum: Last question for you and then I’ll let you go because you’ve been so generous with time. You mentioned hard-right governments coming to power all across the European continent. Are we on the verge of such a thing happening in Britain too?
Campbell: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. But I think we’re in very, very, very volatile times. This could be wishful thinking, but I think Farage, who’s the leader of the best-known populist-right party here—I think we’ve hit peak Farage. I also think he’s made a terrible mistake in being so gung ho behind Trump in relation to Iran. Trump is a uniquely unpopular figure in Europe right now. And he’s actually not that popular in America. I talked on the podcast last week—I saw a polling thing of the most popular world leaders in America. Trump was No. 16. No. 1 was Zelensky, and No. 2 was [Canadian Prime Minister Mark] Carney. No. 3 was [Mexican President Claudia] Sheinbaum [Pardo], and No. 4 was our dear king, of all people. (Laughs.)
I feel that the right wing, they’ve got a lot of traction within the media. We, in Britain, as you know, we have a very right-wing media. We now have our own sort of mini equivalent of Fox News, the GB News. Farage still does not get covered by most of the media as a top-flight politician; he gets covered more as a campaigner and a commentator. But I think as we get nearer to a general election, provided the economy gets better, provided public services improve—which, slowly, they are—then I think Labourers are still in with a fight. However, the fact we’re even saying that, when they got a three-figure majority less than two years ago, is kind of a sign of just how volatile things are. But I’m not convinced the hard right are gonna win here. I’m not convinced. But if you asked me to put my life on it, I wouldn’t put my life on anything right now.
Frum: Alastair Campbell, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining me on The David Frum Show.
Campbell: Not at all. Great to talk you, as ever.
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Frum: Thanks so much to Alastair Campbell for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top of the show, my novel this week is The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, originally published in German in 2023 and translated into English by Ross Benjamin in 2025.
The Director is a book based on historical characters and many true events, which Kehlmann then fictionalizes and reinvents. It tells the story of Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a director who actually existed in the historical record, a prominent maker of silent films in the 1920s, who migrated to the United States in the 1930s and then returned to his native Austria in 1938, after the Anschluss with Nazi Germany.
Now, there’s a lot of controversy about exactly why Pabst returned. Pabst had family in Austria. He was not Jewish. He was able to return. There doesn’t seem to be record of his sympathy with the regime, but he was having career difficulty in America, and perhaps, he felt that the return to the scenes of his earlier success would reignite his career. The record doesn’t show, so Kehlmann invents. And he tells the story of an artist—a great artist, in his telling—who is led by his artistic ambition, but also by a kind of inner moral weakness, into a series of compromises, of ever-intensifying radicalism with ever larger consequences.
Now, the novel is filled with many characters, who, again, existed in the historical record: the actresses Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo. Joseph Goebbels makes an appearance. So, in an amazing display of virtuosity, does the English writer P. G. Wodehouse. Now, the Wodehouse section is worth a mention just on its own. So Wodehouse was very famous already in 1940, very wealthy. He had a villa in France, and he was captured there by the Germans when they invaded France in 1940. He was interned in a camp for prominent civilian prisoners. And then the Nazis struck a deal with him whereby he was released, or allowed to live under more lenient conditions, in exchange for executing a series of propaganda broadcasts, nonpolitical but basically making light of the conditions in which he was held, back to England. Kehlmann creates, invents an entirely new broadcast in the Wodehouse idiom to advance the plot; one of the ways the plot is moved forward is through the mechanism of an imaginary Wodehouse broadcast. And if you’ve read the broadcasts—they are still in print—it is an amazing capture of Wodehouse’s wartime voice, both in its inner refusal to turn traitor, to be a propagandist, but in its kind of moral confusion and its whimsicality in a situation where whimsicality is absolutely the last thing called for. So that is a fine display of art.
And much else in the novel is highly virtuosic and artistic. Kehlmann is able to capture the realities of life under Nazi control through tiny, little devices that make very delicate, subtle little appearances. At a bourgeois tea party, the hostess shows off a beautiful cut-crystal sugar bowl, much finer than the rest of her china, that she has somehow acquired. And when she’s asked where she got the sugar bowl, the room goes kind of awkward, and the subject is changed. Presumably, it’s been looted or stolen from her Jewish neighbors, but she doesn’t wanna say that. The novelist doesn’t tell us that. He just allows us to reconstruct how the moral infections spread through people who thought of themselves as having nothing to do with it, having clean hands, but there they were with a stolen sugar bowl.
There’s a scene in a sanatorium where elderly patients whose minds are a little distracted by old age and dementia help coach each other to seem less impaired than they really are because even in the sanatorium and even in their condition, they are aware that people who seem too impaired disappear to a fate not specified but clearly understood by the people in the sanitarium.
But the central theme of the novel is this question of moral compromise. Pabst is, again, in the novel, a great artist, working on his great masterpiece. And he is drawn to working more and more closely with the regime, in some increasingly ugly ways, in order to achieve the completion of his great masterpiece as the war itself is drawing to defeat for Germany and the war’s completion. And when questioned about his compromises, Pabst explains that he is not a political man. He dislikes the regime as much as everybody. He’s hoping for peace. He has to finish his work because, he explains at one point, the Renaissance was also a time of turmoil, but do we remember the turmoil, or do we remember the art? And Pabst flatters himself that it is his art that will be remembered afterward and that will justify every compromise he’s making.
And the novelist invites us to question whether that is true, and he does it in a way—and this is not a spoiler alert, because it is signaled at the very beginning of the novel—the irony is that the work of art, in fact, will be lost. And the work of art for which he justified everything, which he flattered himself would endure beyond the limits of war, beyond the memory of Nazi atrocities, in fact, that work of art vanishes from the historical record. Again, that’s no spoiler alert; it’s there, at the very beginning of the novel, we’re told that. And so we work through the novel with this ironic awareness that the central excuse the artist is making for himself is not true, will not come true, and what we’re left to wrestle with, the question is, Well, what if the work of art had survived? Would the compromises be worthwhile then? And the answer is clearly no. Art does not excuse everything. In the end, there is a moral reference that is larger than art, and through a series of more ironic displays—and these are kind of spoiler alert, so I won’t go into them—the characters are left to live with the shattered ruins of the lives they have betrayed in order to achieve something they thought was greater, leaving behind the things that were real and in their hands.
I strongly recommend this novel, and there’s a beautiful audiobook rendering of it if you prefer to enjoy contemporary fiction that way.
That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thank you so much for listening and for watching. As ever, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Let me also ask you, if you are minded, to like and share. There’s been a lot of controversy in recent days about the increasingly insane anti-Semitic and paranoiac and conspiratorial nature of the podcast medium. It doesn’t have to be that way. And one of the things I’m trying to demonstrate with this program is that you can produce a podcast in a serious way for serious people, with some light moments, but without conspiracism and without platforming Nazis. You don’t have to do it to find an audience. We’ve been proving that so far, and with your help, let’s prove it on an even larger scale. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for listening, for watching. Bye-bye.
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